The Cat Sitter's Whiskers by Blaize Clement Page B

doing?”
    â€œI’m hugging you.”
    I snuffled, drawing the back of my hand across my nose. “Yeah, I know that. But why ?”
    His voice was steady as he hugged me a little tighter. “You know exactly why.”
    *   *   *
    Long before any of us were twinkles in anyone’s eye, my grandfather, Jesse Napoleon Hemingway, found himself on a business trip in Florida. He was twenty-two years old, newly engaged, and it was the first time he’d ever stepped foot out of his hometown of Manhattan, Kansas. He’d been sent here to convince a group of local businessmen to invest in the latest craze: portable steel sandwich shops, those shiny prefab diners shaped like railroad cars that started sprouting up all over the country in the thirties and forties. They could be shipped anywhere there was a mom and a pop with some cash and a dream of opening their very own restaurant.
    The way my grandmother told it, that Florida air must have gone straight to my grandfather’s head like a double shot of whiskey, because she never found out how many diners he sold on that trip—they never even discussed it. The day my grandfather returned home he presented her with the deed to a plot of land facing the ocean on the southern end of Siesta Key. My grandmother was none too pleased, especially since by her calculation they’d spent at least a hundred hours strolling hand in hand along the banks of nearby Walnut Creek, dreaming about their plans for the future, choosing names for their children, and discussing in which town (within a thirty-mile radius) they would build a home and spend the rest of their lives together.
    In public, at least as a young woman, my grandmother was the model wife, quiet and demure—the way a young woman was expected to be in those days—but behind closed doors she let my grandfather know in no uncertain terms that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell she was leaving Kansas, and if he wanted to go live in a spit of a sandbox on an island in the middle of nowhere like a hermit crab, he could plumb well do it by himself.
    Luckily for me and my brother, my grandfather knew a thing or two about the art of persuasion, because if he hadn’t worked things out between them, not only would we not have inherited this house, we would never have even existed. Using every sales trick in the book, he finally convinced her to make the trip to Florida to see it for herself. They stood shoulder to shoulder at the water’s edge, holding their shoes in their hands as the waves lapped at their toes, and watched the sun set into the sea.
    The sky turned colors my grandmother didn’t even know existed, and she always said it must have been divine intervention, because the beauty of that moment took her breath away. She knew it was God’s way of telling her she was finally home. Of course, it hadn’t hurt one bit that my grandfather had phoned ahead for the local sunset schedule. He had timed their arrival perfectly.
    Now, I live in the one-bedroom apartment over the carport that was built for visiting relatives from back home—it’s small but it suits me just fine—and Michael and Paco live in the main house.
    While Paco unloaded the groceries and Michael put on a pot of coffee, I slumped down on one of the barstools in the kitchen and laid my head down on the big butcher-block island. I told them everything that had happened … well, almost everything. I left Dick Cheney out of the story. At that point, I still wasn’t sure whether I’d fainted or not, and there was no point getting them all worked up about a home invasion or an assault with a deadly Buddha if in reality the whole thing had just been a little light-headedness on my part.
    â€œHold on a second.” Michael slid a cup of coffee toward me with one hand while he dropped a single sugar cube down in it with the other. “What do you